Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Alleged Copyright Violations in AI Training
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have jointly filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, accusing it of mass copyright infringement by using song lyrics to train its Claude models. The publishers are seeking billions in damages.
Two major music publishing groups, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, have filed a joint lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models. The complaint, filed on Friday, accuses Anthropic of what it calls "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
The publishers allege that Anthropic ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its AI systems. They are seeking a jury trial as well as statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work and $25,000 for each instance where copyright management information was removed. Because the complaint claims that "thousands upon thousands" of copyrighted musical compositions were harvested without permission, the total damages could reach into the billions.
Anthropic has not yet commented on the lawsuit. This is not the first legal challenge the company has faced over its training data. Earlier this year, Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group sued Anthropic for allegedly downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs for AI training, seeking over $3 billion. In a separate case, a group of authors accused Anthropic of using pirated copies of their works, and the company settled that dispute for a record-setting $1.5 billion.
